81–90 of 111 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One massive change is that there is almost no ethnic food on these menus (unless you include French). I looked at some of the LA menus and there were zero Asian, Mexican, or Italian dishes. It's impossible to imagine today that you could look at a bunch of hotel restaurant menus in LA and not find at least some dishes that were inspired by those cultures.
If you wanted Chinese fits in the 1800s, you went to a "chop suey" shop in Chinatown.
This also lead to the production of specific table items intended to display celery such as the vase shown in the menus above.
I noticed the prominence of celery, which might surprise a modern diner. I had reason some years ago to look into this and the history is interesting. Celery was at one time difficult to cultivate, growing only in select marshlands. In the absence of refrigeration it was also difficult to transport to city diners, so was considered a delicacy. This also lead to the production of specific table items intended to displ…
Anyone interested in this might also like the tidbit that in Germany, they used to, and still count beer consumed as pencil strikes on the beer paper mat. Altering the number by the guest is legally considered forgery and the disappearance of the beer mat is also punishable by law. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bierdeckel#Urkundencharakter (in German, English wiki doesn't have this info)
Beer mat = "coaster" for the curious. I was originally thinking a paper tablecloth. It was pretty straightforward to understand via browser translation of the wikipedia article, thanks!
Anyone interested in this might also like the tidbit that in Germany, they used to, and still count beer consumed as pencil strikes on the beer paper mat. Altering the number by the guest is legally considered forgery and the disappearance of the beer mat is also punishable by law. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bierdeckel#Urkundencharakter (in German, English wiki doesn't have this info)
The dataset of menus and items is all hand labeled and verified at menus.nypl.org.
I was about to link to the same "What's on the Menu" site, which I remembered being an impressive site for library digitization project years ago, but it was apparently retired in January 2025. Now [1] redirects to [2], essentially an About page with links to the data. [1]: https://menus.nypl.org [2]: https://www.nypl.org/research/support/whats-on-the-menu [3]: https://web.archive.org/web/20241222134751/https://menus…
The ice cream flavors are more meaningful those days. Nowadays they have every possible combinations like the weird "green chilly ice creams"
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The first menu I opened had tongue sandwiches and hot beef tea. So some things have definitely changed!
Cow tongues are amazing with mashed potatoes amd horseradish sauce! Very well known dish in Central Europe